Celebrating Upstate: The first co-ed medical school in the nation
BY MANTOSH DEWAN, MD
President, SUNY Upstate Medical University
This year, Upstate Medical University is celebrating 175 years of co-ed medical education. It is one of the many “firsts” at Upstate, and a significant one.
Upstate traces its roots to 1834, when the Geneva Medical College (precursor to today’s Norton College of Medicine) was established to provide doctors to care for the communities that were springing up along the Erie Canal. When Elizabeth Blackwell graduated at the top of her class in 1849, she was the first woman to graduate from a U.S. medical school, and a legacy began.
Elizabeth Blackwell also is a story of persistence. She was inspired to pursue medicine after a dying friend confided that her illness would have been more bearable if she had been treated by a female physician. Blackwell applied to 29 medical schools. Her acceptance to Geneva in 1847 was designed as a joke among the student body. She founded the New York Infirmary for women and, returning to her native England, was the first woman on the British Medical Register.
We are proud of our roots as the first co-ed medical school in the United States and that today, women make up half of the nation’s medical students.
This story appears in the 2024 Upstate Health magazine, Issue 1.
Presidents of the classes of Upstate's Norton College of Medicine gather by the portrait of Blackwell in Weiskotten Hall. From left: Nathan Ihemeremadu, Gavrielle J. Rood, Katherine Narvaez Mena and Christopher Bushnell.
